Laura Vertatschitsch - Keynote SpeakerDr. Laura Vertatschitsch is a Senior Researcher at Systems & Technology Research (STR) with degrees in electrical engineering, mathematics and physics. She has experience and publications in the fields of numerical modeling of ionospheric scattering phenomenon, wideband digital signal processing, and digital receiver instrumentation for radar and astrophysics applications. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics she developed and deployed wideband digital receiver systems globally for the Event Horizon Telescope, and these systems were used to take the first ever picture of a black hole. At STR, Dr. Vertatschitsch continues to develop her sensor system engineering expertise for the Department of Defense. Currently, she is involved in development of a remote sensing system to provide cybersecurity for compute-constrained devices that cannot run traditional anti-virus software (for example, Internet of Thing devices in our homes). She hopes her engineering fundamentals will continue to grow throughout her career and carry her to new and exciting problem spaces.
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Jessie Norriss - Tech Paths for Non-CS Majors & Tech for Social GoodJessie Norriss is a member of Upstream Tech’s Growth and Partnerships team and leads their efforts in watershed conservation and restoration monitoring. In this role, she brings her experience working with stakeholders in water and environmental management from land trusts to engineering operations. Previously, Jessie worked at the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife in wetlands conservation, and at Stantec (formerly MWH) as an environmental engineer evaluating green infrastructure and climate change resilience in the US and Latin America. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for Living Observatory, a Massachusetts-based non-profit focused on wetland restoration. Jessie holds an MS in Water Resource Engineering and Environmental Policy from Tufts University, and a BA in Geography from the University of Texas.
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Riya Patel - Diversity Panel & Tech Paths for Non-CS MajorsRiya Patel is the Lead Innovation Targeter for Dcode. Dcode is a Washington DC based technology accelerator, focused on bringing better technology into the federal government. Dcode’s mission is to improve government by connecting the commercial technology industry with federal agencies to solve the nation’s toughest challenges. Riya is dedicated to improving the jobs of service members and civilians through the implementation of better technology and cultural reform that embraces innovation. She previously spent time at the Department of Defense with Defense Innovation Board, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Intelligence Community. She holds a BA from Tufts University in International Relations & Russian Language. |
Sandy Carielli - Security Strategy for the Internet of ThingsSandy Carielli has spent over a dozen years in the cyber security industry, with particular focus on identity, PKI, key management, cryptography and security management. As Director of Security Technologies for Entrust Datacard, Sandy guides the organization’s next generation security and technology strategy. Prior to Entrust Datacard, Sandy was Director of Product Management at RSA, where she was responsible for SecurID and data protection. She has also held positions at @stake and BBN. Sandy has been a speaker at RSA Conference, SOURCE Boston, the NYSE Cyber Risk Board Forum and BSides Boston. She has a Sc.B. in Mathematics from Brown University and an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
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Angelie Xiong - Tech Paths for Non-CS MajorsAngelie Xiong is a Product Management Associate Analyst at Mastercard. She graduated from Tufts University class of 2019 with a double major in Psychology and International Relations. She now works on the Consumer Prepaid team at Mastercard. Her roles include various tasks such as supporting product launching and marketing in global and regional markets and identifying new product user cases with existing technical capabilities. For her junior year summer internship, she interned as a Product Manager at Dotdash (formerly About.com), a digital publishing company in New York, and worked on products including online ads and consumer content websites. At Tufts, she was part of 180 Degrees Consulting and Tufts Consulting Collective, through which she worked on a project with IBM on the business strategy of their cloud database products. She also used her spare time practice SQL, HTML, and CSS. Outside of work, Angelie is a passionate dancer and photographer.
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Lisa Michaud - Modern Conversational AIDr. Lisa Michaud was told by a classmate in her first CS course in high school that girls can’t program computers. She went on to do a double major in Computer Science and English Literature at Williams College. When she found out that the field of Computational Linguistics combined her passions for coding and human language, she knew she had found the topic of her PhD. She has been a Computer Science professor, a software architect, and an engineering manager. She is now a Senior Product Manager for the Intelligent Virtual Assistant Platform at Interactions. Her work focuses on the challenge of enabling humans to interact conversationally with technology, from a chatbot on a website to Amazon Alexa or Siri. In her free time, Dr. Michaud rides horses, plays clarinet in a concert band, starts science fiction writing projects that she never finishes, and is a voice actor in audio drama podcasts.
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Millie Liu - Tech Paths for Non-CS MajorsMillie Liu has focused her career on helping entrepreneurs with deep technology turn their ideas into great businesses with global reach. She was previously at APT, an enterprise data analytics startup acquired by Mastercard for $600m where she helped Fortune 50 clients such as Walmart and P&G make better strategic decisions leveraging data. She was also the co-founder of an MIT startup working on unsupervised event detection, which later pivoted and became Infervision, an AI precision healthcare platform backed by Sequoia China. Millie is on the advisory board of MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). She holds a Master of Finance degree from MIT and B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Toronto.
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Helena Deus - Deep Learning in HealthcareHelena Deus received her PhD in Bioinformatics from Lisbon University where she focused on Linked Data and Semantic Web applications for Health Care and Life Sciences, with an emphasis on Cancer Research. Helena is passionate about applying data science to improving healthcare – in particular for oncology. She works for Elsevier as technology research director and is leading the effort to build a knowledge graph for health. Prior to joining Elsevier, Helena's roles included directing a data science team at Foundation Medicine and leading the Health Care and Life Sciences strategy at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute. Helena has published over 30 peer reviewed papers and was one of the winners of the Big Data Track in the 2013 - Semantic Web Challenge and of the Linked Data Cup with her work on linking data from The Cancer Genome Atlas.
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Beth Semel - Ethics of TechDr. Beth Semel is a Postdoctoral Associate in Linguistic Anthropology at MIT. With support from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, she has been ethnographically studying the emerging field of Computational Psychiatry since 2015, focusing on efforts to automate psychiatric screening. Her research offers a behind-the-screen look at the work that goes into building machine listening technologies for emotional state detection, examining how ideas about mental illness, language, and human difference get baked into algorithmic systems that might otherwise seem neutral. Through teaching, mentoring, and scholarship, Dr. Semel hopes to show how vital social science perspectives are to conversations about medicine, care, and AI, and to show that technical problems are always social, cultural, and political. Semel holds a PhD in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) from MIT, an MA in Anthropology from Brandeis University, and a BA in Writing and Literature from Emerson College.
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Rajitha Chaparala - AI in FintechRajitha Chaparala is an AI and data analytics enthusiast with over 15 years of experience across diverse industries. In her current role at Intralinks as Director, AI product management she works to simplify M&A Due Diligence for Intralinks customers using Natural Language Processing. Over the span of her career she has built products and data analytics operations from the ground up, facilitated by data-driven business decision-making; She has an MBA in technology management with broad industry experience, including financial services, telecommunications, energy and SaaS. When she is not working on technology she enjoys traveling and working in her garden growing flowers and vegetables.
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Ehi Nosakhare - Ethics of TechEhi Nosakhare is an Applied Scientist at Microsoft's New England Research and Development Center (NERD). She designs, develops and leads the implementation of machine learning (ML) solutions in application projects for Microsoft's products and services. In August 2018, she graduated with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her dissertation was on developing probabilistic latent variable models and variational inference methods, and applying them to healthcare problems. Ehi got her S.M. in EECS from MIT, and graduated with a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, summa cum laude, from Howard University, Washington DC. As a student, she completed internships at Microsoft and IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. She is a recipient of a best paper award at the ML for Healthcare Workshop at NeurIPS, a top tier ML academic conference. Ehi has been honored as a Tau Beta Pi Scholar and Fellow, and is a member of IEEE Eta Kappa Nu honor society. She is very passionate about using ML to solve real-world problems and studying the ethical implications of ML/AI. In her spare time, she enjoys reading and re-learning to play the cello.
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Jeanne Harran - Design Thinking for Better UXJeanne Harran is a product designer and user researcher. She is an evangelist for user-driven design at Intralinks. She has collaborated with key stakeholders, product managers, and engineers to create top-notch experiences for her customers for the past seven years. Studying industrial design at Syracuse University as well as human-computer interaction at Bentley University has prepared her for a successful career in the fin-tech industry. In her most recent role at Intralinks, she has built up a formal user research practice to help bring her fellow design colleagues closer to the people they build products for.
When she isn't sketching or conducting brainstorming exercises, she spends her time documenting her adventures around the globe as a woman in tech for purewander.com. |
Katherine Dubé - Diversity PanelKatherine Dubé is responsible for defining and shaping Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform product roadmap and strategy. Her current focus is expanding OpenShift’s deployment footprint in the public cloud and on-premises as well as helping to promote the platform. Katherine has been involved in the cloud computing, enterprise storage, and high-speed networking industries for the past 25 years. She is also a certified technical rebreather diver and enjoys wreck diving throughout the world.
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Elizabeth Baran - Product ManagementElizabeth Baran is Director of Product Management at Algorand, a technology startup that recently launched a new, first-of-its-kind, blockchain protocol that brings sub five-second transaction finality, security, and decentralization to the blockchain space. Prior to joining Algorand, Elizabeth was a Product Manager on the Amazon Alexa Machine Learning team where she built out the first non-English language data teams that helped power Alexa’s initial launches into non-US markets. Later she led a team there that developed new techniques to generate multilingual data that improves machine learning algorithms for international launches. Elizabeth has a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in Chinese, with minors in French and Linguistics. She received her master’s in Computational Linguistics from Brandeis University.
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Claudia Mihm - Diversity PanelClaudia found her way into technology through her love of education. While studying at Tufts, she realized that she can use technology as a tool to create and improve educational experiences, and double majored in Computer Science and Child Study and Human Development. This realization led her to work throughout undergrad in DevTech Research Group, which creates technologies that teach young children computational thinking. She now works at EF Education First, an international education and travel company, on the Emerging Technology and Innovation Team (which is all-female!). On her team, she has continued working in the overlap of education and technology, wearing the hats of designer and developer to create tools to enhance the traveler experience. Her team works to build a number of tools to help increase delight, educational impact and equity in all of EF’s educational tour experiences. When she’s not at work, she enjoys biking around Somerville, playing guitar, and boxing.
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Carla Deras - Diversity PanelCarla is a Software Engineer and instructional designer at PTC, where she develops enterprise training for IoT and AR, while she co-chairs HOLA, the Latinx employee resource group and actively participates in the Inclusion and Diversity initiatives at PTC. Born and raised in El Salvador, she moved to the US when she was 19 where she went to college in Melbourne, Florida. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering and a Master’s in Science in Engineering Management from Florida Institute of Technology. During her time in college, she served as Student Government president for two years, where she focused on empowering women, international students and other minorities making sure all students have equal access to professional and extra-curricular activities. These efforts deserved her the Joan Bixby Award and U.S. Congress recognition for enhancing the climate for women’s participation and development on campus. Carla spends her free time volunteering at Boston Children’s Hospital and going on hikes with her dog.
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Vanessa Ferranto - Product ManagementVanessa Ferranto is an established Product Management executive with experience in developing Product and Agile processes in growing B2B and B2C teams. She has a passion for solving complex problems with an emphasis on the user experience across native, responsive web and data-driven products. Vanessa’s experience spans multiple industries including Financial Services, Healthcare, Transportation, Digital Media, Mobile Point-of-Sale and E-Commerce. Vanessa is the co-founder of the Boston Women in Product group, whose mission is to build a community that empowers and encourages women in the fields of product management, marketing and user experience. She is also the co-creator of the Agile Product Open group, which focuses on bringing Agile principles to Product Management. Vanessa is a graduate of Rider University with a Bachelor's degree in Music.
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Johanna Santos Bassetti - Tech for Social GoodJohanna Santos Bassetti is a graduate of Stanford University and has a background in product strategy, neuroscience, and design.
As Product Director at JustFix.nyc, Johanna employs technology in the service tenants' rights, preventing displacements and keeping people in safe and healthy homes. She believes in using a community and empathy-driven design approach to bridging the gap in legal empowerment. Before joining JustFix.nyc, she was Vice President of Digital Products at Planned Parenthood, where she championed the right of all people to access to healthcare and education. She is an avid sailor in the Summer and a devoted opera-goer come Winter. |
Kade Crockford - Ethics of TechKade Crockford is the director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts. Their work focuses on issues at the intersection of technology and civil rights. Currently, Kade is running a statewide campaign to place a moratorium on the government's use of face surveillance technology. In their spare time, Kade likes to cook, lift weights, and walk in the woods with good dogs.
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Christine Pizzo - Design Thinking for Better UXChristine Pizzo, our Eastern Region Experience Design Lead at Intrepid Pursuits, carries a Master’s Degree in Advertising: Creative Technology/ Experience Design, and over 12+ years creating in the digital space. Current role is a blend of growing experience design practice as a core business and fostering a highly craft-skilled based team from 14 to 55+ in 3 years. Always willing to roll up sleeves as a design thinking facilitator and product design lead, helping launch digital experience across mobile, web and Alexa devices for both National and International Fortune 100 clients. With passion derived from enriching a product’s personality and truth, her digital focus is strategic thinking and conceptual ideation - developing a client’s transformational product.
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Emily Ng - Tech Paths for Non-CS MajorsEmily Ng is currently a User Experience (UX) Researcher at Google (via Adecco) for products that help users navigate and explore the world, such as Google Maps. In this role, she analyzes user feedback and behavior to create recommendations for product teams. She graduated from Tufts University in 2019 with degrees in International Relations (Development Economics) and Colonialism Studies, and got her footing in UX research through internships at Mailchimp and Spotify. She’s interested in discussion around the tech industry’s role and responsibility in modern politics, and how to create thoughtful technology rooted in human complexity. Outside of work, she enjoys going to museums, cycling around Brooklyn, and reading at independent bookstores.
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Sarah Newman - Tech for Social GoodSarah Newman is a Senior Researcher and Principal at metaLAB at Harvard, and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. As a researcher expressing ideas through installation art, her work engages with technology’s role in human experience. One area of focus is the social and cultural implications of new technologies, including Artificial Intelligence. Newman holds a BA in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has exhibited work in New York, San Francisco, Miami, Berlin, London, and Rome, and has held artist residencies in Germany and Sweden. Newman is a 2017 AI Grant Fellow, a member of the 2018 Assembly Cohort, and a Co-Founder of the Data Nutrition Project, which addresses bias in AI models through tools and educational practices.
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Tanya Kolosova - AI in FintechTanya Kolosova is an innovator and actionable analytics expert. Tanya is a co-founder of and Chief Analytics Officer at InProfix Inc, a startup company that develops analytical technologies that intelligently match the right risk with the right price helping insurers to create and maintain profitable portfolios. Tanya has extensive knowledge of software development methods and technologies, artificial intelligence methods and algorithms, statistically designed experiments.
Tanya studied Ph.D in Statistics in Tel Aviv University, Israel under supervision of Prof. David Steinberg. In the past, Tanya co-founded WatchWise – a pioneer in real-time web analytics, DemandWise, and ZeroChurn. Tanya co-authored two books on statistical analysis and metadata-based applications development with SAS and her 3rd book “Supervised Machine learning: Optimization Framework and Its Applications” will be published by CRC Press in December 2019. Tanya enjoys travels, modern and contemporary music, art, and literature. Tanya is also an avid tennis player. |
Christina Hawkes - Ethics of TechChristina Hawkes is a generalist engineer at Canopy, a private discovery architecture startup based in Brooklyn and Boston. Canopy’s mission is to create delightful personalized experiences that respect people’s privacy and digital identities. Christina’s role as a Generalist Engineer is to help make things actually work across all levels of Canopy’s tech stack. Prior to Canopy, Christina worked as a software engineer at healthcare and analytics startups in the Boston area. She is a devoted problem solver and technologist who has always focused on the ethical implications of her work and employers. Christina received her B.S. in Computer Science from MIT in 2007. She is currently very into singing Lithuanian folk music, as well as knitting and kayaking.
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More speakers coming soon!